Teaching Happiness, Emergencies in the Eye of the Beholder, No Bull for UK Hikers, and Tips on Tipping.
Business schools at major universities such as Harvard are adding a new course to their curricula. MBA students are clamoring for acceptance to these over-subscribed keys to managerial success. Managing happiness, relationships and work-life-balance are taught at Harvard to the 180 students who have been lucky enough to make it into the 7-week half-credit course at Harvard. Take-aways: share happy moments, recharge with campus therapy dogs, live in “day-tight containers”, which its practitioner says means -- stay aware of future goals but live in the present.
The most popular courses for international Chinese students are engineering, math and computer science, and physical life science.
When is an emergency not an emergency?
The Biden administration has decided that the Covid emergency still exists, despite the declining impact of the virus on American life. It seems that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party succeeded in linking the expansion of Medicaid and food stamps to the existence of the “emergency”. Work requirements for able-bodied adults have been lifted, and average monthly payments doubled to $240 per person. Result: What the WSJ calls “The Eternal Covid Emergency”.
Meanwhile, it has decided that the health care emergency that allowed enforcement officials to turn away some illegal border crossers no longer exists, and will repeal Trump-era application of Title 42 of a law passed in 1942 to prevent the spread of communicable disease. Since this time two years ago, two million migrants have been turned away using Title 42 authority and the argument that a public-health emergency exists.
The new position, in effect that the public-health emergency no longer exists, comes at the same time as the administration is attempting to extend its rule that travelers on mass public transportation must continue, at least for a while, to wear masks, the risk of infecting others on a trip to visit grandma being so great, greater even than the risk created for others by illegal trips across our southern border.
In short, the government believes that Americans (66% vaccinated) are more at risk from each other than from hundreds of thousands of illegal border-crossers whose vaccination status is unknown, and more than a few of whom are members of MS-13 and other gangs according to Border Control officials. It is not known how many unvaccinated or dangerous illegals are among those loaded by the administration unto planes at night, flown to an obscure New York airport, and dispersed around the country.
Some laws are difficult to enforce. In Britain, the law provides public access to parts of the countryside, even when that requires landowners to permit use of paths through their property.
It has now become necessary to issue guidance to temper disputes that are the UK version of those that once had America’s cattlemen gunning down homesteaders who fenced in open ranges.
According to the NYT, new guidance urges farmers, beset by unleashed dogs that frighten flocks and hikers who leave gates open, among other ills, “Do not use misleading signage, such as ‘bull in field’ if it is not true.”
Although British farmers seem less eager to reach for their shotguns than America’s ranchers once were, at least one decided that peaceful complaints would not protect his flocks. He who used a forklift to destroy a car parked on his property, and was acquited by a jury that relied on a 17th law providing for the right to defend private property. That, it seems to have felt, might be old, but it is no bull.
Economists remain puzzled at the preference of 60 percent of Americans for tipping as opposed to a service charge. Studies show little or no relationship between server performance and the size of tips, and in the case of transient customers no reason there should be. But even the size of tips by “regulars” has little to do with server performance according to many studies reviewed by The Economist, although some surveys show that servers believe that the size of tips is indeed a function of the quality of service rendered.
So much so that when famous restaurateur Danny Meyer eliminated tipping in his high-end eateries, staff turnover rose so much that he had to restore the practice. Sensitive souls object that tipping forces servers to fawn on customers, and the tax collectors that it allows evasion. Not yet widely recognizing, that since out-of-home dining prices quickly reflect inflation, tipping is an inflation-proof method of compensation.